Manchester Conditioning Update 7

The power is back!

Since Laura is out of town for a wedding, I took Kaitlyn out to Manchester today to help me take care of her oysters. My goal for today was to move my oysters to the bottom shelf since Laura no longer has any broodstock buckets down there.

The first thing we did was change out banjos in her larval buckets. Kaitlyn saw that the banjo in bucket HL6 AMB 180, so it was brimming when we got there. Steven then helped us switch all of the water lines back to the heated ones, as the power was back. The filters didn’t look too dirty and since replacing the one micron filter wasn’t a high priority, I left the filters untouched. While he was doing that, I bleached the algal lines and drained and cleaned the oyster and heating tanks. I found one dead oyster in Tank 4A.

Table 1. Revised oyster counts in each tank.

Tag Label

A

B

Total

1

7

9

16

2

8

8

16

3

6

6

12

4

6

7

13

5

9

8

17

6

7

8

15

Heat Shock

5

6

11

Full Amb

7

8

15

Spare

2

3

5

Total

57

63

120

I had Kailtyn rinse the downwelled silos outside while Steven and I reconfigured the C. gigas set-up. We moved the heating tank to the bottom shelf and attached a longer PVC pipe to one end of the T-junction. Water was then able to flow into two different kiddie pools. Because the pipes are two different lengths and the water is flowing by gravity, adjusting the flow will be a bit more difficult than normal. I increased the setpoints on both heaters to get water up to temperature as well.

Figures 1-2. Heater setpoints.

Since the bottom shelf was plumbed with Laura’s 19 ºC water, we also added in a tube that flowed 19 ºC water into my heating tank. This would help maintain water temperature. However, this means flow from the heated 14 ºC line needed to be decreased, which decreased the amount of food the oysters received.To compensate for the lower feeding from low flow, I increased the dosing rate to 50%. I then fed the oysters with 100 L of Tetraselmis and 250 mL of Reed’s paste. This isn’t a lot of food for them, so I need to ensure they get fed more when I get out there. I added two tripours of food directly to the heating tank and a tripour into each kiddie pool since the oysters didn’t have food while being cleaned and moved.

Figures 3-4. Kiddie pool arrangement.

I then took care of Laura’s oysters. Kaitlyn and I filled her inside two algae headers and outside algae header with a 50/50 mix of C.iso and CGW. I used these same algae strains when feeding and doing a water change with her growth experiment.